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Firefox 3.1: Control-Tab Woes

Atul recently had a great post about the problems of Control-Tab, which is currently in the nightly for Firefox 3.1. While I agree with everything Atul said, and I’d go a couple steps further. The problem that Control-Tab addresses exists—we waste a lot of time switching between tabs, an in particular switching back and forth between a set of tabs. It is also great that we are taking the steps to ensure a better user experience without being scared of adding animations and escaping standard widgets. Control-Tab, as it stands now, is a good starting place for discussion.

Besides the points Atul points out (unexpected results due to tab-state modality as well as breaking natural mappings), the new interface has been completely seduced by interaction seduction. It has a low information density, which is particularly apparent in that only only 3 tabs are displayed at a time, and even then only the current tab’s title is displayed. Low information density results in a high-interaction (fidgety) interface that feels constraining. It’s like trying to solve a maze in which you can never see further than the next turn: you can’t see where you are going or where you come from. I give a talk called Don’t Make Me Click, where I show a marginally humorous redesign of Google—the apropos bit starts at minute 10—you’ll see a lot of not-as-humorous parallels to the current Control-Tab design.

There are two levels of problems here. The first is of the interface for feature as-is. The second is questioning the assumption for why we need the feature in the first place, and whether we can get a better product by re-asking the question differently.

Redesign

Most of the interaction problems have to do with with the visual design of Control-Tab. Let’s take a cue from Tufte to find a high information-density solution, that uses macro/mico scaling to not overwhelm.

The basic idea is to extend the tab bar down, to include thumbnails combined with the favicon (the later of which is an Alex idea). Using some sort of arrow, Firefox indicates which tab you are jumping to in the context of the current tab strip. It can also show further jumps. This attempts to solve the problem of the current interface by not providing a confusing new tab ordering by giving a strong visualization of which/where the tabs you are switching between. You also end up with a much higher information density, and the ability to easily visually browse without much interaction.

The main problem to be solved with this approach is extreme scale. What happens when you have 100 tabs, and are Control-Tab’ing between the 2nd and the 98th? There are lots of ways of dealing with this, but the easiest is ellipsification to contract the space between the separated tabs.

I’d love someone with a bit more visual design talent to take a stab.

The Bigger Picture

Jenny Boriss recently added new mockups to the design process. The design addresses many of the information-density concerns of first problem, although it doesn’t look at the problem of an ever-changing order that frustrates my spatial memory (which is my personal bane when using Command-Tab on the Mac).

Before we dive too deeply, it may also be worth looking at entirely different solutions. The solution proposed by Madhava of adding tabs to the Awesome Bar is a much more scalable and elegant solution. With barely any new interface, it provides a weak form of visual search coupled with a strong form of textual search. It also streamlines my work flow by not incurring a Hick’s Law penalty for making me think about whether something is already open, or whether I need to open it in a new tab. In addition, it solves the problem that it is easier to open a new page than it is to find an existing tab—leading to multiple duplicate tabs.

I’d add one thing to Madhava’s proposal: a bit of semantics. Let’s add a “last viewed tab” as something you can type into the Awesome bar. That way, to switch back to the last tab I was viewing, I’d hit Command-L and type “last viewed tab”, return. As the awesome bar is, indeed, awesome, soon I’d only have to type the first two characters, “la”, to get there.

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“although it doesn’t look at the problem of an ever-changing order that frustrates my spatial memory”

And that is very much the main problem with the current Ctrl+Tab implementation. It makes it SOOO frustrating. This really is interaction seduction and I hope Mozilla have the courage and sense to back it out.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the whole problem of “finding the tab you want” (mostly cos I have too many tabs open at a time). One possible solution is introducing automatic tab groupings and the simplest way to do this would be to group tabs by where you opened it from. This might actually work pretty well because personally, I tend to go to a website and then, open a bunch of links from there. Say, you’re on Digg and most of the time, you would want all the tabs you opened from Digg to be seperate from the tabs you opened from Gmail or Google Reader. Perhaps, when a tab grouping becomes too large, like you end up on Techcrunch from Digg and you open 10 blogposts from Techcrunch, this would become a separate group. By grouping, I mean the way they are ordered on the tab bar (with a little space between each group). Whenever you open a new tab, it’ll insert itself into the appropriate position instead of the end of the tab bar. You can also drag and drop tabs to change their grouping. Another advantage of this is if you’re searching for something on Google and you open a lot of tabs from the search results, once you find what you want, you can simply close this whole group.

I guess this solution changes a lot of things from their current state but it would scale well. (I’m gonna try implementing it using Ubiquity and see how it goes).

I had actually made the suggestion earlier that Firefox bring tab context into perspective.

Think of it this way, on your television you can change channels in numerous ways. The remote you get with the TV gives you the option of switching between two different channels with one button.

Oh and I love this idea for the record. In general, with any Window you can preview the tab without actually switching to it. How annoying would it be if you were to hit ALT+TAB, and without being able to “surf” through options, the application automatically switched to it.

I think you could use this thumbnail concept and extend it further so you’re not immediately jumping between tabs.

In addition to this, you could possibly add something where say CTRL+SHIFT+TAB switches between two different tabs repeatedly. This way, I can for instance switch between a blog post and an e-mail without having to tab through a dozen tabs in between (like the Last button on a TV remote).

I completely disagree that tab management is a problem. That said I do run Tab Mix Plus. The default configuration of that seems fine.

I find it really hard to believe people spend any amount of time poking around looking for tabs. Maybe it’s just me but I can easily navigate the tabs I have open through a combination of favicon and the smallest pieces of text available even when tabs get squished. I’ve considered using whatever that extension is that makes tabs just the favicon but that’s not effective.

All this hassle about Control Tab is toying with a feature that is not really required IMHO. Admittedly Colourful tabs thingo is the 9th highest addon at AMO but is this from downloads or ratings or both? If downloads that is a completely false metric unless the figures are decremented when an extension is uninstalled. How many downloads really are used?

I try not to have to many tabs opened in the same window… but when I have to, the extension “faviconize tab” is a very nice solution: on double click it reduces the tab to it’s favicon — it makes it easier to organize my tabs bar and saves a lot of space — right now this page (no favicon, shame on you Aza) stands between the favicon of google reader and the favicon of youtube, I also know, even though it is not written there, that the “don’t make me click” movie is the third youtube favicon… not perfect, I know, but it works very well for me.

Instead of building a pile of hacks to make Ctrl-W, Ctrl-tab, Page-Up and the tab bar use three different tab orders (last visited only, last visited sequence, last opened), it would be far smarter and less confusing to use just one, sensible, order.

A bit of history:
firefox 1: tabs open to the far right, closing a tab goes to the left. Only one, visual, order. This makes you jump from the far left to the far right of the tab bar, but at least it is consistent.

firefox 2: tabs open to the far right, closing a tab jumps to the last tab displayed, but only if you close just one tab. We now have two different orders.

firefox 3.1: Ctrl-tab uses last-displayed tab order. We now have three different orders, two of which are visually represented in different contexts.
The ctrl-tab hack will help the heavy browser at the expense of cognitive load, and be useless to the average non-shortcut-aware user.

IE 7, tabs open relative: tabs open next to their parent. One order for everyone, shortcuts don’t clash with the spatial metaphor.
There is no need for any other order because related tabs are already next to each other.

The bug for having parent-child tab order was unfortunately shot down by the infuriatingly unjustified opinion of mozilla “UI experts”.

@Colin: Ctrl/Cmd-1 and Ctrl/Cmd-9 are the horribly underdocumented ways of getting to the first and last tabs in Firefox.

To Asa: Thank you very much for your look at this. I’m tired of being the grumpy habitual user who is completely ignored in such UI changes. I consider the non-linear changes to be just as bad as Window Grouping in the Windows taskbar and Mac Dock/Cmd-Tab window. All of these things badly break muscle memory – and I’m a visual person…so I can very easily recall “Oh yeah…that’s /n/ tabs back.” I heavily rely on Ctrl[-Shift]-Tab in Firefox, and will be a decent bit saddened if I have to hack it out with about:config.

I think the is no stringent need for this feature in the browser, much less for it to have a graphical interface showing thumbnails of the tabs. That time would be much well spent improving the performance of the browser and the standards compliance.
I personally use the Tab mix plus extension to change the order in which tabs open (next to the one that opened them) and close (to the last selected). This arrangement works best in most cases. Through this extension I have also tested the possibility to have ‘Ctrl+Tab’ switch between the most recent tabs and I can’t say it’s a big improvement over the normal behavior.

Regarding your semi-circle visualization, there’s also a much simpler way. Firefox already makes the currently-active tab’s appearance different. If the recently-used tab also looked different (like a much simpler version of Aging Tabs), one would immediately know which tab Ctrl+Tab will focus.

Of course, whether the recently-used function is even necessary is still a good question. I hate that window managers force me to stop what I’m doing and analyse the Alt+Tab list in order to find the window I want, instead of using the visual order that I already know.

I thought that I should post this now, in the interest of being part of the conversation, but I do not, of yet, have a (computer) drawing or mockup, though I’m working on one. If there’s interest, I’ll find a way to scan my paper mockups, and put them up.

I commented about the Firefox 3.1 tab stuff on someone else’s blog somewhere…

I just wanted to say that I watched your whole “Don’t Make Me Click” talk and thought it was great. Really easy stuff to follow, and yet everyone (including me) seems to get it so wrong so much of the time. So thanks for the insights.

I would like to know if it is easy or possible to do an extension that provides new sources for the awesome bar to search. For example, maybe I want tit to check my delicious bookmarks or Google Web History (which collects from multiple places) or from my friends shared bookmarks.

I would do unspeakable things in order to get a firefox plugin that made the tabs look/behave like the mockup shown underneath the text “Let me propose one solution. It draws inspiration from the semi-circle visualizations that highlight similarities” (up above in this post).

And that is very much the main problem with the current Ctrl+Tab implementation. It makes it SOOO frustrating. This really is interaction seduction and I hope Mozilla have the courage and sense to back it out.

And that is very much the main problem with the current Ctrl+Tab implementation. It makes it SOOO frustrating. This really is interaction seduction and I hope Mozilla have the courage and sense to back it out.

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Called an interface guru by publications like Wired and Fast Company, Aza is the co-founder of Massive Health, and was until recently Creative Lead for Firefox. Previously, he was a founding member of Mozilla Labs. Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally. Aza has founded and sold two companies, including Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays in its first week. He also creates modular cardboard furniture called Bloxes. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics